plagiarism

plagiarism

Using ideas, plots, text and other intellectual property developed by someone else while claiming it is your original work.

Viva Texas! Since the content in this encyclopedia was placed online in 1997, and although copyright notices are prominently displayed, thousands of definitions have been, and still are, copied to other websites without copyright attribution, typically in quantities from a half dozen to a couple hundred. The most interesting copyright infringement was a Texas stage agency. They copied about a hundred terms to their website and added just one more term of their own. The term they added was "plagiarism." True story! See copyright.

Plagiarism

a form of violation of the rights of an author or inventor. It consists of the illegal use under one’s own name of another’s scientific, literary, or musical work, invention, or rationalization proposal, in full or in part, without recognition of the source from which the material was drawn. Under Soviet law, a plagiarist can be charged under either civil or criminal law, depending on the degree of the crime’s social danger.

Under civil law (as set forth in the Civil Code of the RSFSR, arts. 499 and 500), the author—and after his death, his heirs and other persons indicated by law—has the right to demand the restoration of his violated rights, for example, by announcements of the violation in the press. He also has the right to demand a ban on publication of the work or a ban on its distribution. In case of losses incurred, the author may demand restitution. Under criminal law (as set in the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, art. 141), plagiarism is punishable by deprivation of freedom for a period of up to one year or by a fine of up to 500 rubles.

There is an increasing demand from faculty for software that allows better detection of instances of plagiarism, either to catch the culprits (in the case of intentional cheating) or to make students more aware of the issue and the extent to which their borrowings might be inappropriate--and new software tools such as Turnitin and SafeAssign (the latter available within Blackboard at UMass Boston) are perceived as a way of fighting fire with fire.

The word plagiarism comes from the Latin for "to kidnap"--an apt description, considering that it involves kidnapping another person's thoughts and written work and claiming those thoughts and work as your own.

Amid claims that his LSE thesis may have been ghost -written, the LSE is investigating allegations of plagiarism and in a statement yesterday, confirmed a degree can be "revoked if there are substantiated concerns about the manner in which it was attained - for example if there is a later discovery of plagiarism," The Independent reports.

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